Elizabeth Abel, Associate Professor of English, who specializes in feminist theory and modern fiction, is able to transform a classroom "into a genuinely open intellectual space," according to one of her colleagues.
"My philosophy of teaching," she says, "is grounded in my desire to help students develop and trust their own voices in the midst of the tumultuous debates unfolding in the humanities today."
"More than any other aspect of teaching," says Abel, "I treasure one-on-one advising." It is in office hours and conferences, she says, that she can elicit "the often buried, anxiety -producing questions which engage students most intensely." Students praise her concern for them: "Her interest in us makes such a difference. She has brought off the near alchemical task of teaching us to examine the texts in relevant ways through a lecture style that invites class participation."
Among her scholarly pursuits, Abel has written and lectured widely on Virginia Woolf. Her seminars on Woolf are legendary, and justly so, according to one student who commented that "This seminar has been an exhausting adventure, consuming the texts of Virginia Woolf. And it has been the most rewarding experience of my life."
Abel joined the Department of English in 1982. She received her BA from Swarthmore College in 1967 and her PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University in 1975.
Statement Of Teaching Philosophy
A conductor at the podium, arms raised, beckoning to certain voices, quieting others, striving for a complex harmony in which all participants can be heard: this has always been my self-image as a teacher. I care more about provoking and shaping debate than about disseminating information, more about how students respond to one another than about whether they listen passively to me.
My philosophy of teaching is grounded in my desire to help students develop and trust their own voices in the midst of the tumultuous debates unfolding in the humanities today. I want students to engage with these debates, to understand what motivates them, what social and intellectual positions are served by them, and how they play out in particular readings of literary and cultural texts. Only by learning to situate themselves within this complicated and shifting terrain, I believe, can students come to understand and affirm, criticize, or re-evaluate what shapes their own analytical strategies and the questions they bring to their classrooms and their texts.
Instilling in students the confidence to take charge of how and what they learn is my deepest pedagogical desire. More than any other aspect of teaching, I treasure one-on-one advising. My greatest pleasure is to elicit the often buried, anxiety-producing questions which engage students most intensely but which have seemed to them illegitimate or impossible to voice within a particular disciplinary frame.
After extended talks last year with an Honors student who couldn't commit herself to a thesis topic, it became clear that her most passionate interest was not in literature but in photography, and that, far more problematically, she associated the acute pleasure and danger of photographic representation with her chronic experience of manic depression. When I encouraged her to work with those connections rather than trying to suppress them, she wrote an extraordinary thesis on photography's relation to time, death, and emotional instability, a thesis that drew connections never made before. In a note she submitted with the final draft, she said, "I leave Cal, ready to enjoy a freedom I have never before taken hold of." To enable that kind of work by listening attentively to what each student is struggling to think through and by giving her or him permission to track dimly apprehended but powerful associations that transgress discursive boundaries: this is why and how I teach.